Wooga removing games from Google+

Wooga is removing its games from the Google+ platform. Diamond Dash, Monster World and Bubble Island will no longer be available to G+ players as of July 1.

Social Games Observer first reported the closures, pinning them on a lack of G+ users to sustain the game. We had heard some developers claim the “numbers aren’t there” to support a social games ecosystem, but some were optimistic that Google’s more focused approach to curating social games would yield healthy retention if not large audiences. On Facebook, Diamond Dash ranks as wooga’s largest title at 17.7 million monthly active users and 3.6 million daily active users, according to our AppData traffic tracking services. Note that Diamond Dash alone is cross-compatible with an iOS version, which gave the game a bump in traffic after launching in December 2011.

Wooga served as one of the launch partners for G+’s games service along with Zynga, Playdom, PopCap Games and Kabam. The German developer stood out from these partners’ early offerings by focusing on two arcade titles and a farming role-playing game. According to what some developers have told us, Google+ doesn’t populate its game genres with too-similar titles. The platform also offers very few social features, currently limited to invites, a games-only activity feed viewed from the Games tab and more recently a site-wide chat feature that offers no games-specific activity (e.g. sending game items via chat message).

The developer did not respond to request for comment as of press time.